Quickfire: initial chief executive Malcolm Gerrie is taking on the challenge of turning the Nelson Mandela-backed 46664 charity concert in South Africa into TV gold.

How did you get involved?

It came to us from lots of different angles. Dave Stewart is a longstanding friend who I've known for 25 years, from the days when he was husking around Sunderland, and he was talking about it when the project was a twinkle in his and Nelson Mandela's eyes. Then we got a call from Queen's manager Jim Beach asking if it was something we would like him to help with and we met with the director Dave Mallet, who has just done Fashion Rocks for us, and I just thought it was the most brilliant idea.

From tantrums and tiaras at Fashion Rocks to raising money for Nelson Mandela's fight against Aids and HIV in Africa--that's a bit of a leap, isn't it?

We've also done other charity events including launching the first Red Hot And Blue and that ended up selling albums and TV programmes around the world.

What's the deal with the money?

You don't want to do it for a loss--you have to cover costs. And with producing this, as opposed to a big commercial DVD for a premier league artist, there is a huge amount of goodwill involved. You have to take a view on how many of these things you can do a year, but Initial is very lucky because we have things like Fame Academy and Big Brother.

Is this your biggest project to date? What's the biggest challenge of making a show like this?